Two years after the Islamic jihadist attack on the World Trade Center, a book appeared which purported to reveal a conspiracy to cover up the truth about a major world religion. According to the book, powerful people, both inside and outside this male-dominated, woman-hating religion, had conspired to falsely represent it as a religion of … Read more
Over at the National Catholic Reporter blog, John Allen has an intriguing discussion of There Be Dragons, Roland Joffé’s upcoming film about the life of St. Josemaría Escrivá, the founder of Opus Dei. From a journalistic point of view, it’s tempting to style “There Be Dragons” as a sort of anti-Da Vinci Code – a pop culture portrayal of Opus … Read more
I think the thing that is most repulsive about the current media feeding frenzy on Pope Benedict XVI is the appalling combination of slovenly malice with the sheer self-congratulatory demand that Catholics should be gratefulfor their vendetta against him. You know: “Oh, we make some mistakes now and then, but where would you be without … Read more
Unam Sanctam is the sort of document that gives our Protestant brothers and sisters a real jolt, primarily because it looks at first blush as though it teaches that Catholics cannot have Protestant brothers and sisters. Written by Pope Boniface VIII in 1302, this papal bull concludes with a shocking dogmatic definition: We declare, … Read more
We noted last week that one of the principal problems of trying to treat Scripture as a purely human book is that, though God can supernaturalize nature, we cannot naturalize the supernatural. God can assume a human nature and join it to His divinity, but we cannot take a supernatural thing and reduce it to … Read more